Today, Let Us Remember the Bizarre-Ass Video Game About Hillary Clinton's Cat

A look back at Socks the Cat Rocks the Hill, the long-lost game about the Clintons' famous cat—and one man's dogged attempt to bring it back to life.

We judge our presidents by many factors—including, though many would prefer not to admit it, their pets. George Washington had a whole stable of dogs, including, purportedly, a greyhound named after Charles Cornwallis. Warren Harding's airedale terrier Laddie Boy was a national sensation. And faced with controversy, both Franklin Roosevelt and Richard Nixon scored political capital by directly appealing to dog lovers, in a pair of now-famous speeches. And after promising his daughters a puppy, win or lose, during the 2008 presidential election, the Obama family ended up with a pair of Portuguese water dogs in the White House.

But only once in our great nation's history has a presidential pet been deemed worthy of starring in his very own video game. I'm talking, of course, about Socks, Bill and Hillary Clinton's pet cat, and the star of the unreleased Super Nintendo game Socks the Cat Rocks the Hill.

The early 1990s were an absolute gold rush on platformer games starring cartoon animals—if the end result of a gold rush was nuggets of shit instead of nuggets of gold. The success of 1991's Sonic the Hedgehog and its subsequent sequels led to tons of fascinatingly awful knockoffs like Bubsy in Clawed Encounters of the Furred Kind and Awesome Possum… Kicks Dr. Machino's Butt. (Note: Both of those titles are real.) These Sonic knockoffs tended to share a few defining characteristics: floaty controls, ugly graphics, and a transparent attempt to wallpaper over those flaws, and many others, with a heap of in-your-face baditude.

In 1993, the now-defunct Japanese video game company Kaneko attempted to ride that wave with a series of platformers built around licensed characters—most notably, two separate games starring Cheetos mascot Chester Cheetah (dubbed Too Cool to Fool and Wild Wild Quest, respectively). But while a planned platformer based around 7-Up mascot Fido Dido seemed poised to pigeonhole Kaneko as the go-to company for stoner munchies-to-video game adaptations, the company also set their sights on a higher prize: Socks, who they viewed as an ideal candidate to star in his very own Super Nintendo game—titled Socks the Cat Rocks the Hill—in 1993, with a separate Sega Genesis game to follow.

How do you adapt a presidential pet for the 16-bit era? I'll let this magazine advertisement for Socks the Cat Rocks the Hill—which describes the game as "a madcap adventure to save the world from nuclear annihilation"—do the talking:

"Socks, the White House cat, discovers the missing portable nuclear launch unit in his favorite napping spot, the basement of a foreign embassy. To avoid mass destruction, he must return to the White House and alert the first family. But, a foreign spy ring has their own political agenda. They want to see Socks run, and not for political office!"

In case you missed it: Yes, this is really a game in which the actual U.S. president's actual pet cat is tasked with saving the actual world from nuclear apocalypse. And man, are there a lot of people who want a nuclear apocalypse! Over the course of the game, Socks was set to square off against paparazzi and protesters, gun enthusiasts, mice in trench coats, bulldogs in army helmets, and—in an inspiring display of nonpartisanship—a Democratic donkey.

Other level bosses reportedly included real-life political figures like Gerald Ford, Ross Perot, and Jimmy Carter (who had a "smile attack"), whom Socks would encounter as he attempted to stop an ex-KGB agent from detonating a "Rush Lim-Bomb." And if that wasn't weird or controversial enough, a 1993 Playthings Magazine article reported that the game's roster of villains would also include "Arab terrorist felines." In an interview with the retro video game site SNES Central, a Socks developer recalled that the game also featured "Nixon calling in bomb raids" and "Ted Kennedy driving a car around on a bridge."

So why don't you remember this game? Because, I am sorry to report, the release of Socks the Cat Rocks the Hill was eventually cancelled, though the game was close enough to completion to merit reviews from Gamepro, Nintendo Power, and Electronic Gaming Monthly. You might assume that Nintendo balked at the content of this surprisingly toothy political satire; the Super Nintendo, after all, was the console that infamously insisted on turning all the blood in Mortal Kombat II into sweat. But according to Ellen Fuog, Kaneko USA's onetime vice president of marketing, Nintendo was relatively bullish about the game’s prospects. "Socks absolutely did not fall victim to any Nintendo censorship policies," she told SNES Central. "Quite the contrary, they liked the idea; they liked the game. Everyone did." According to Fuog, and several others who worked for Kaneko at the time, the game was ultimately the victim of a more mundane fate: Kaneko deciding to shutter its U.S. office in 1994.

Yes, this is really a game in which the actual U.S. president's actual pet cat is tasked with saving the actual world from nuclear apocalypse.

Meanwhile, the world moved on without Socks, who was supplanted by Buddy, a chocolate lab the Clintons adopted in 1997. Socks and Buddy hated each other—enough so that Bill Clinton once joked that he did better with "the Palestinians and the Israelis than […] with Socks and Buddy"—and when the Clintons moved out of the White House, they took Buddy home, giving Socks to secretary Betty Currie. Socks died in 2009, a full 16 years after his video game was supposed to hit the Super Nintendo. One has to imagine he didn't give a shit either way.

And that's where the story would end, if the internet didn't have such a long memory for weird video game minutiae. The only reason Socks the Cat Rocks the Hill crossed my mind in the first place is because I actually remember seeing the advertisement for the never-released Super Nintendo game in some magazine 20-odd years ago. And when I started digging around to figure out what happened to it, I discovered that the Socks the Cat Rocks the Hill fandom is still very much alive.

In 2012, Socks enthusiast Tom Curtin acquired the only known copy of the prototype for the game, which he calls "the most anticipated unreleased video game of all-time. Ever. For any platform." He has since teamed up with developer Second Dimension to clean up all the existing bugs. A Kickstarter campaign—which has earned more than $28,000 of a $30,000 goal as of this writing—promises to release the game on computers, as well as actual Super Nintendo cartridges. That's right: If the campaign actually reaches its goal, Socks the Cat Rocks the Hill will actually be playable on actual Super Nintendo consoles, a full 24 years after its originally planned release date.

Just don't bother trying to bring anything about this bizarre relic of the '90s into the modern day. When asked whether Socks would vote for Clinton or Trump on the Kickstarter's FAQ page, Curtin scoffs. "Don’t be silly," he says. "He’s a cat. And he's dead."